Review of Bee Health

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society—Bees in Crisis: Honey Laundering, and Other Problems Bee-Setting American Apiculture

December 14, 2015

Editor’s Note: Dr. Berenbaum’s complete article is available here. Below is a brief excerpt.

From: PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY | VOL. 158, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2014

MAY R. BERENBAUM, Professor and Department Head, Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Among the first studies of CCD to be published was one by Diana Cox-Foster and colleagues at Penn State and Columbia, who used a technique called metagenomics to identify new pathogens and parasites (Cox-Foster et al. 2007). Basically, metagenomics is the use of genomic methods to examine entire communities of microbes associated with a particular environment; in the case of Cox-Foster et al. (2007), the environment under study was the body of a honey bee. These investigators found a panoply of pathogens, including one Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) that had never been reported in the United States. These authors identified a strong correlation between the presence of this virus and a diagnosis of CCD. That it was not strictly the causative agent of CCD was suggested by a study published one month later by Chen and Evans (2007), documenting the presence of IAPV in U.S. bees collected in the years before CCD appeared. Nevertheless, pathogens, old and new, encompassing bacteria, fungi, microsporidia, trypanosomes, gregarine protists, amoebae, and almost 20 different viruses, continued to be implicated in CCD specifically and bee decline in general (Evans and Schwarz 2011). In 2009, vanEngelsdorp et al. (2009a) showed that bees with CCD are associated with a heavier pathogen load. . . .